A snippet from the article. I removed some content for brevity.
For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected.
For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today. The Southwest is sweltering under a heat dome. Vermont saw a deluge of rain, its second 100-year storm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began—a milestone surpassed again the following day. “For a long time, we were within the range of normal. And now we’re really not,” Allegra LeGrande, a physical-research scientist at Columbia University, told me. “And it has happened fast enough that people have a memory of it happening.”
...a growing number of climate scientists now believe we may be careening toward so-called tipping points, where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change—leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted. “The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1°C global warming,” Armstrong McKay and his co-authors concluded in Science last fall. We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.
Some tipping points will interact, worsening one another’s effects. When melt from Greenland’s glaciers enters the ocean, for example, it alters an important system of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Right now it’s the feeblest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.
A shutdown of that ocean current could dramatically alter phenomena as varied as global weather patterns and crop yields. If the temperature of the sea surface changes, precipitation over the Amazon might too, contributing to its deforestation, which in turn has been linked to snowfall on the Tibetan plateau.
One grim paper that came out last year, titled “Climate End Game,” mapped out some of the potential catastrophes that could follow a “tipping cascade,” and considered the possibility that “a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.”
Chris Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and a contributor to several IPCC reports, warned that “at some point, the impacts of the climate crisis may become so severe that we lose the ability to work together to deliver solutions.”
I've often wondered about this over the past ten or fifteen years. The analogy that I always considered was that of the car that's already left the road, and is now flying through the wild blue yonder, on its way to a smack-down with the ground. Once the car is airborne, there is little that can be done, except perhaps to hold on a bit tighter. I do wonder if there are any reasonable counter-theories to this. In other words, are there reputable, respected scholars and researchers who believe we still have a chance to reverse the damage.
Reversal isn't possible at this point unless we find some incredibly effective and inexpensive ways to go carbon negative. The goal has always been about limiting the extent of the damage, which is still something worth striving for - more people will die at 1.6 C than 1.5. But it's a grim calculus right now because no one's sticking to their emissions targets.
I still think there’s something to be said for the carbon sequestration plan of “plant a ton of trees and bury them deep underground”
The math there is still pretty unfavorable. To take an oversimplified case and assume that woody biomass is 100% cellulose, 1 metric ton of tree material would represent roughly 700 kilos of sequestered CO2. So to mitigate 1 gigaton of emissions we'd need almost 1.5 gigatons of trees.
A quick Google suggests a mature pine has about 750 board feet of lumber (at roughly 1.25 kilos per board foot) - we can assume there's some mass in the unusable wood and say that you get 1 mt of wood per mature tree. So we're looking at 1.5 billion trees to mitigate 1 Gt of emissions, and total global emissions are currently at 34 Gt/yr, ergo we need 51 Gigatrees for one year's worth of mitigation. Assuming you need roughly 10 square meters per tree, that's 510 bn square meters, or 510,000 sq km, an area the size of a large US state. And we have to wait 30ish years for those trees to grow, hope they don't get burned down in a wildfire, and then find somewhere large enough to sequester all the timber.
Assuming plenty tipping points are reached and Earth will heat up by much more than the 2°C target due to it (instead of due to emissions which come on top), even then it would be good to do what could be done against the climate catastrophe - including reducing emissions.
Why? Cause even in that Earth that is much less livable and which carrying capacity without new technologies and such would reduce itself hefty, it would profit from a reduction in heating up due to emissions. Tipping points are not a reason to stop action.
Right. Totally agreed. I almost didn't post the article because of that point. But its good info, and it doesn't say that nothing should be done. The message I got from the article is that we need to proceed with more caution, perhaps be more selective about what we pursue, because we are entering a time of unintended consequences, unforeseen results.